


A room at the end of the world

by iridescentglow



Category: The Fosters (TV 2013)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 03:21:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1154166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iridescentglow/pseuds/iridescentglow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brandon and Callie start sneaking around when Stef and Lena forbid them from seeing each other. Cue: angst and makeouts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A room at the end of the world

**Author's Note:**

> Written post-#1.12 (House and Home). I’m sure this story will be washed away by new canon immediately, but hey, maybe you want to read some emo porn (and, uh, actual porn) about Brandon and Callie sneaking around and making out.
> 
>  **Warnings:** mentions of Liam.

They don’t talk.

They embrace in the hallways at school; full-body hugs, clinging to one another, snatching for themselves the few seconds between classes, before the second bell wrenches them apart. The usual crush of people fills the hallway, hooting and hollering, but Brandon and Callie barely notice.

In the library for study hall, they hold hands under the table, fingers gripping too tight. Her nails leave half-moon impressions on the back of his hand and he studies them for hours afterward, like they might be hieroglyphics he could decipher.

And, in the bare bedroom that isn’t really hers, they kiss every night like it might be the last time.

Words have let them down, so they touch instead.

Brandon thought that if he told the truth, if he came clean to his moms, everything would work out. And then the opposite happened: he talked and it blew up in his face. So maybe talking is overrated. Callie certainly seems to think so. She has gone from taciturn to near-mute, speaking only the most sparing of sentences. Her eyes are cloudy and she bites her lip instead of talking.

“It’s not that you’re forbidden from seeing each other,” Stef says. “I just think some space between the two of you is the best idea.”

Lena tracks their movements in school and Stef picks up the scent when Brandon gets home. When Brandon asks to visit Callie, Stef sucks her teeth and says no. When Lena catches he and Callie together in the music room after school, Lena gently guides Callie out the door. After a couple of weeks, Brandon is even mysteriously reassigned to a new study hall group.

So, basically, they’re forbidden from seeing each other.

It’s not like that stops them.

Unauthorized visitors may not technically be allowed in the Girls United house, but rules are no match for a group of teenage girls. Dinner is the easiest time to sneak in. Callie’s roommate – Puckish and dressed in boy’s clothes – lets Brandon in through the back door and leads him upstairs. Cole is her (no, his) name, Brandon learns. “Twenty minutes,” Cole says with a suggestive smile as he opens the door to Callie’s room.

Callie arrives moments later, fresh from kitchen duty. He finds flour in her hair when he buries his face in her neck. He finds bolognaise sauce at the corner of her mouth, which he kisses away. Wordlessly, she wraps her body around his. And he loves her loves her loves her.

Twenty minutes. That’s how long they get. That’s how long before the House Mother comes prowling for after-dinner checks and he must leave.

The room is bare, shabby, full of ghosts of sad girls long departed and empty of furniture. They end up on the bed, inevitably. Limbs tangled together, kissing furiously. He is always amazed at how the awkwardness of her demeanor, the stiff way that she holds herself, melts away when they kiss. She’s so good at pretending to be cold, but up close, she’s so _warm_.

He knows there’s ban on talking, but somehow he can’t help but try.

“Callie… are you okay here? This house?” he ventures.

She’s pressed beneath him on the bed, heavy lids hiding her eyes. She pauses to consider and he feels a blast of coldness return before she answers. Her voice is hard when she says:

“I’m surviving.”

She pulls him down into another kiss and it’s clear the conversation is over.

Cole bangs on the door a moment later: it’s the signal that their time is up and Brandon must go.

*

Every night that Brandon is able to get away from the police state of his house, he comes back to repeat the pattern.

Twenty minutes. A shabby room. An old bed. And Callie in his arms. 

Each evening, it’s the same. Callie’s skin is warm and her mouth opens to meet his when they kiss. Her body is soft and yielding beneath him, but when he tries to talk to her, she is utterly unyielding.

“Callie… maybe if we talk to Lena and Stef together,” he says. “Maybe if we’re, I don’t know, really well-reasoned about it. They’ll have to listen then.”

“Won’t work,” she says.

“Callie… they need to understand. They need to accept it. That. I love you.”

He looks at her, searchingly. He doesn’t expect her to say it back, not really, but he’s definitely not anticipating what she says next.

“We can have sex,” she says expressionlessly. “If you want.”

“…I want to wait until you’re ready,” he says haltingly.

“Well, that ship’s sailed.”

It’s the blankness in her voice that’s unnerving. She kisses his neck, then the tender spot beneath his earlobe. She rolls her body against his, breasts crushing against his chest. And, _ohjesus_ , he wants to.

Cole’s knock on the door saves him from himself. Today’s twenty minutes is up.

*

“You guys don’t even fuck, right?” Cole says a couple of nights later as he lets Brandon into the Girls United house. “All this star-crossed lovers horseshit and all the action’s still PG-13? …You’re sure you don’t prefer boys?” Cole gives him a suggestive look and laughs.

“Thanks, Cole,” Brandon says brusquely and turns his back on the other boy. He takes a seat on Callie’s bed and listens as Cole leaves the room, still laughing.

The door opens again a few minutes later and it’s Callie.

She closes the door and leans against it. For a moment, she looks like she’s about to say something. But instead she unzips her jeans and rolls them down over her thighs. He watches from the bed, frozen to the spot, as she kicks her legs out of her jeans and then wriggles out of her underwear.

She’s still wearing her t-shirt, baggy and faded, and there’s flour in her hair from cooking. But the sight of her standing there, naked from the waist down, is probably the hottest thing he’s ever seen. It’s hotter than Talya posing self-consciously in Victoria’s Secret lingerie. It’s hotter than the Victoria’s Secret catalog models in the same lingerie. It’s… _jesuschrist_ , it’s really hot.

Callie advances across the room and climbs on top of Brandon, kissing him hard.

It’s approximately the same as all their other make-out sessions, because they’re only kissing and he’s fully dressed. But he’s also painfully aware that she straddling him with bare thighs. Which is new entirely.

Then she takes his hand and guides it between her legs. And it’s.

Sex.

Maybe not the insert-tab-A-into-slot-B kind of sex. Maybe not Marvin Gaye, sexual-healing kind of sex. But it’s sex regardless.

“Callie, wait…” he says, thinking of her blank-voiced proposition: _we can have sex_ , phrased like, _we can order pizza._

“Brandon,” she says in a low voice. “I just want to feel something. Something other than sad and angry and hurt and… broken.”

Her cloudy eyes are dark and impenetrable now. She kisses him again and his fingers push involuntarily against the slick folds of her labia. She sighs into mouth and adjusts her hips to give him better access. He slips two fingers inside her and her warm wetness flexes around his hand.

When he lost his virginity to Talya, they talked about it beforehand. They talked about it a lot. With each other, with his moms. They planned, they set a date, they researched everything. They talked and talked and talked. Then, when they finally did it, it was kind of a letdown. A rite of passage, sure, but without the passion he’d expected.

As Callie rocks against him, he feels it now. The euphoria. The desperate, achy shiver. The sense that the world might be ending and he doesn’t care. He’d once imagined passion as wispy red clouds of desire, but this right here with Callie is a dark, slick expanse of feeling.

He rubs her clit and her body bucks against him. God, he’s hard. God, he wants her.

He feels how close she is to coming and he wonders if he, too, might come, just from the friction of her in his lap. Just from the force of his desire.

Then, suddenly, he looks at her and it’s like her face is crumbling.

She literally falls away from him. Her body lurches away in a sudden, desperate motion. She scuttles across the bed —away, away, away—until her knees are up against her chest and her back is against the wall.

“ _Sorrysorrysorry_ ,” she mutters. 

“Callie, what’s wrong?” he asks.

He waits for her reply and it doesn’t come. She says nothing: bitten lips, cloudy eyes.

He looks down. She’s all over his hands, she’s at arm’s length, she’s a hundred miles away.

The silence that grows between them is dense and suffocating, like it might actually be sucking the air out of the room. He listens to Callie’s breathing, shallow and staccato. 

“Just when I think I’m over it, it turns out I’m not over it,” Callie says at last, in a low voice. “I think I’m in control and then—I’m not. It’s him. All of a sudden, it’s _him_ who has all the control. He’s there in the back of my head, telling me what I can and can’t think, what I can and can’t _feel_.” Callie’s hands ball into fists. “I hate it.”

 _Liam_. The unspoken name hangs heavy in the air.

“Callie, I—” he begins, but then he can’t find the end of the sentence. Everything he wants to say is stupid or meaningless. _Callie, I’ll always protect you._ (Stupid.) _Callie, I wish I could take the pain away._ (Meaningless.)

“Callie, it’s only you in your head,” he says finally.

Tentatively, he reaches for her hands. Her balled fists slacken, accepting his touch. He laces sticky fingers through hers, gripping tightly.

The atmosphere of suffocation recedes and she’s back in his arms.

She crawls back into his personal space, until they are pressed against each other, clinging. It’s the only way they know how to be anymore. Tangled up and desperate.

She guides his hand back between her legs again, but he shakes his head.

“No, you,” he says.

She is hesitant at first, her breathing ragged in his ear as she slips her own hand between her legs. Then she’s not hesitant at all, rubbing and grinding and pushing herself over the edge. And all he can do is hold her, breathe her in, catch her as she falls out of her orgasm.

Her cheeks flush as she shudders against him. And then she _smiles_ and he realises it’s the first time he’s seen her smile in this room, in this house.

 _IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou_ , he thinks as he kisses her smile.

The thump of Cole at the door comes much too quickly.

It’s a physical pain to separate himself from her. They scramble to make themselves look acceptable – Brandon flattening his hair, Callie tugging on her jeans – but it’s not as easy to erase their punch-drunk expressions or weaving inability to walk straight. The smell of sex in the air.

He opens the door with one hand, while his other hand holds Callie’s, unwilling to let her go. Fingers laced together, fingernails digging in hard enough to leave marks.

When he finally does let go, Brandon remembers something and laughs.

“Your roommate asked if I prefer boys,” he says.

She joins in his laughter. “Do you?”

“No. I prefer you.”

“I prefer you, too.”

It’s less pressure that the L-word. He realizes now how she must have recoiled mentally from that word. She must have felt that he was trapping her, tricking her. For Callie, love is unreliable.

Words, in general, are unreliable.

As he leaves the house, Brandon looks down at the back of his hand, at the half-moon impressions Callie’s fingernails have left there. Those indents in his skin mean more than a thousand words.

**Author's Note:**

> _“I was buried like treasure_   
>  _But no one ever came to mark the spot_   
>  _So I got good at pleasure_   
>  _And started tying tighter knots”_   
>  **‘Room at the end of the world’ by Matt Nathanson**   
> 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this story. Feedback is loved and adored. Please leave me a comment here or find me on [tumblr](http://iridescentglow.tumblr.com/).


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